Are Public Positions on Climate Change Changing?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen

This is a follow-on to Bob Tisdale’s recent piece on Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources’ changes to its Great Lakes climate change statement.

If you read his article and didn’t click through to the original article by Lee Bergquist in the Wisconsin Journal Sentinal, you might have missed how significant this change was.

Here it is in pictures: [click each for larger images]

In 2012, the page looked like this:

The red boxed link is to the infamous Wisconsin Climate Change Activity Guide provided as a resource to teachers of grades 7-12. It can still be found cached in the WebArchive [aka the Wayback Machine]. Today, it is no longer linked from the Great Lakes page and the link to it in present time returns “Page Not Found”.

Today:

Instead of the “AGW party line” statement on the 2012 page (which existed until last week), we have a more carefully considered statement:

“The Great Lakes and a changing world

As it has done throughout the centuries, the earth is going through a change. The reasons for this change at this particular time in the earth’s long history are being debated and researched by academic entities outside the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The effects of such a change are also being debated but whatever the causes and effects, the DNR’s responsibility is to manage our state’s natural resources through whatever event presents itself; flood, drought, tornadoes, ice/snow or severe heat. The DNR staff stands ready to adapt our management strategies in an effort to protect our lakes, waterways, plants, wildlife and people who depend on them.”

This is a magnificently crafted statement – and a huge pull-back from heretofore obligatory echoing of the IPCC consensus talking points.

But this is not the only big change I have seen this past week in the presentation of climate change. The big change, if it is in fact an editorial change, appeared in another story previously covered here at WUWT, in the New York Times:

“President-elect Donald J. Trump has packed his cabinet with nominees who dispute the science of global warming. He has signaled he will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He has belittled the notion of global warming and attacked policies intended to combat it.”

Three weeks ago, in a news report titled “Energy Trends Outpace Plans for the E.P.A.” (Dec 09, 2016) – by Coral Davenport, this language was used: “President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice of a fossil-fuel advocate and climate-change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency comes at a moment when the American energy market has already shifted away.”

Nagourney and Fountain don’t use the phrase “climate-change denier” nor the oft-repeated but false notion that the President-elect “believes climate change is a hoax”, rather they use the more correct phrase “dispute the science of climate change”.

In fact, the last times both terms were used in the New York Times, outside of the Opinion page, were in an article by Clifford Krauss and Maggiue Heberman on December 10th, “Exxon Mobil Chief Rises on Secretary of State List“, “…Mr. Trump has called climate change a hoax created by the Chinese for business reasons, and has named a climate change denier, Scott Pruitt…” and in a news review article posted to the NY Times online on Dec 12 : “Climate Change News That Stuck With Us in 2016” in which John Schwartz (a NY Times environmental journalist) is quoted “How do you talk about climate change during a presidential administration that denies it’s happening? President-elect Donald J. Trump has called climate change a hoax…”. (This last did not appear “in print” online until Dec 14 and the entries from various journalists were probably written before the Krauss/Heberman story even though they appear several days later).

It now has been two weeks and counting since such language appeared in any NY Times news article. One can only hope that this represents a change in editorial policy — a change to the style manual of the NY Times.

How long can one of the world’s leading newspapers continue to publicly label US Presidential Cabinet members with the nasty epithet “climate denier” and repeat the untruth that the President-elect believes* that “climate change is a hoax” – something that he has repeatedly denied?

I do not know if this represents a real change at the NY Times but I certainly hope so.

# # # # #

* His official views on climate change are shared here for anyone who cares. He has said “a lot of it” [global warming] “is a hoax” — a matter of opinion shared by many — and he freely admits to once have publicly jokingly tweeted – in 2012 – that it was ‘perpetrated by China to steal our factories’.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment Policy:

I love to read and respond to your comments. I have almost zero interest in US two-party politics, which I consider to be “what’s wrong with the American governmental system”. I will not be discussing the back-and-forth of Republican-vs-Democrat politics, and prefer that it be skipped here.

This essay is about how Climate Change is portrayed in public – on governmental websites like that of the DNR of Wisconsin and in the press. With the Presidential election results expected to deflate and/or depower the pressure to conform to IPCC climate consensus talking points, it will be interesting to see how public statements change and how the press changes its portrayal of the issue in the news.

Please comment with examples that you are seeing in your local papers and on local television.

250 thoughts on “Are Public Positions on Climate Change Changing?”

I’m still seeing the boilerplate warnings about “climate change” damaging various
archeological sites in most of the archeological reviews and reports coming out…
even though many of those sites were set and built in lush surroundings a couple
thousand years ago.
The irony of brining up “climate change” as a parenthetical topic in these
circumstances seems lost on most of the writers, editors, and readers.
Desertification, ocean rise, land subsidence, along with natural flooding, tsunamis,
and earthquakes have shadowed man’s march toward civilization for the past five
millennia.

R.S. Brown ==> If we are to see a change from the pressured echoing of boilerplate IPCC talking points, it will be slower, I think, in the “Learned Societies”. Certainly, papers appearing in journals this month were written well before the election — and editorial policy will be slower to change than the text of papers.
I expect to see the simple omission of AGW language first — dropping usual the kowtowing paragraph about AGW.

The simple truth is that those studying climate in the sense of atmospheric physics, knew long ago that the models had failed. But for obvious reasons they have been in no rush to say they were wrong. Which then means a lot of other people who once upon a time were being told “climate change is certain” … are still relying on some pretty old statements which no longer reflect the honest viewpoint of most academics.
In reality it’s gone from “we’re certain we’re right” … to “we’re not certain we’re wrong” … which means there is absolutely no requirement on them to correct previous statements.

Recently it has been political suicide in Canada to dispute CAGW. Stephen Harper pretended that he was doing something about it. Everyone had to give it lip service.
The Canadian province of Alberta has bent over backwards to show that it is reducing ‘carbon pollution’. (Yes I know the premier is NDP.) There was a concerted campaign to ban and shut in Alberta’s oil sand production because it was ‘dirty’. The province had no choice but to show that it was dealing with ‘carbon pollution’. The premier had to crawl on her knees to New York and grovel before the rich and powerful. Disputing the science behind CAGW was not a possibility.
Certainly, the election of President Trump has given people hope and stiffened their spines. People who previously kept their mouths shut for fear of the consequences will now speak up. We will see if it is the tide gently turning or a tsunami.

The coming series of severe cold weather that the 30 year cooling cycle will bring Canada to its senses pretty quickly. And last night, yet another blizzard on my NY mountain…winter is closing in on us all.

Dr. Lindzen’s observation is a good starting point for a paper or dissertation on climate science.
We have the number of people who describe themselves as climate scientists vs. the increase in funding. The question has the advantage of being quantifiable. It also has the advantage of being fairly clear cut (to the extent that anything in the social sciences is clear cut).

The global warming petition project has topped out at about 31,000 signatures. http://www.petitionproject.org/ I personally have not signed it because my company deals with NASA and I don’t want us to get blackballed. Let’s see if more folks sign up because they feel less threatened by the AGW masters.

Seriously, there ought to be a “Canadians for global warming” movement. More growing seasons, warmer weather, it’s all upside for Canada! So these alarmists in canada want to suffer so you can have longer winters and colder nights? Are they nuts?!?!

The problem is, according to the CAGC dogma, warming at higher latitudes will result in a ‘neutral or negative’ impact on agricultural production.
I do not know what logical hoops the IPCC went through in order to convert longer growing seasons and increased CO2 into a ‘neutral or negative’ impact, but it an accepted tenet of CAGW.

SkepticalNef December 31, 2016 at 4:42 am
The problem is, according to the CAGC dogma, warming at higher latitudes will result in a ‘neutral or negative’ impact on agricultural production.

During the MWP the vikings were able to farm in Greenland. Warming at higher latitudes makes agriculture possible where it wasn’t possible before. As always, the warmists demonstrate the need for a liberal education because they clearly don’t have it. If they knew a smattering of history, they wouldn’t say such stupid stuff.

The DNR change the Tisdale brought to our attention looks a lot like “oh we’re not alarmsists, misinforming the public, we’re the good guys. Please don’t defund us”.
Expect a lot more of this as the alarmists climb over each others dead or dying bodies to grasp for last drops of gravy from the disappearing gravy train.

Wisconsin elected a GOP governor three times in a row (once in a recall attempt) and a GOP senator twice, while also choosing Trump for president. Both houses of the state legislature are controlled by Republicans. The DNR wisely read the writing on the wall.

It may have been provocative campaign-speak, but it wouldn’t be out of the realms of possibility that the Chinese encouraged the UN to develop global warming as a massive wealth redistribution effort for Western countries, and supported it publicly, fully knowing that they would never abide by its dictates, hence profiting from the whole carbon taxing, eco-regulating, industry-decimating deal that it left to the West to implement.

Considering that the result of the Paris accord was that the Chinese could continue to emit as much as they want, which means go from 10 billion to more than 15 billion tons, and the West would reduce dramatically…. he may have been, and was historically incorrect, but he was right about whose interests all this serves.
The Chinese didn’t invent it, we did this to ourselves, but they are not averse to profiting from our idiotic supposed solutions to the problem.

There are a lot of posters on this site who have invested a lot of hope and energy in the assumption that Trump is a skeptic with regard to climate change. If the writer of this article is correct, they may be deeply disappointed. Admittedly Trump may climb down from that lofty and somewhat extreme position in the same way has he has done with other claims and commitments he has made during the election, but there is plenty of material out there that suggests he was pretty convinced that climate change and the science was a con when he made the statements.

“There are a lot of posters on this site who have invested a lot of hope and energy in the assumption that Trump is a skeptic with regard to climate change. If the writer of this article is correct, they may be deeply disappointed.”
======
If the writer of the article is correct about what?
=====
“…there is plenty of material out there that suggests he was pretty convinced that climate change and the science was a con when he made the statements.”
=====
Are you saying that Trump will likely stand by his word, as evidence cited in the article regarding appointments indicates, and therefore a lot of posters who wanted a genuinely skeptical President will be disappointed … because they got one?
What point were to trying to make?

Trump’s ‘official’ position is, “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of “climate change.” (from the Science debate article). Certainly sounds like a skeptical view to me. He goes on to list several possible ‘better’ uses for the $29 billion we invest in ‘Climate Change Research’.
He is correct that the current trend to ‘renewable’ energy makes American (and European) manufacturing less competitive with their Chinese counterparts by raising our energy costs.

If Trump becomes aware of the Wisconsin headline, Dilbert, and others if they follow, it may embolden him to stay the course, Uhm he’s kind of a bold guy so I’m hoping he doesn’t need a whole lot of encouragement.

Exactly, Trump does need social support, especially in the present environment. It should even be possible to initiate a kind of positive feedback process between the administration and other concerned parties.

Ironicman.
So do you agree with the articles statements that :
“How long can one of the world’s leading newspapers continue to publicly label US Presidential Cabinet members with the nasty epithet “climate denier” and repeat the untruth that the President-elect believes* that “climate change is a hoax” – something that he has repeatedly denied?”

Gareth is twisting one tweet into an endless series of circular arguments.
Throws a strawman post in and then twists answers. A rather familiar thread derailing technique.
In another month, we will get some of the ideas just what Trump’s Administration will bring.
EPA’s actions were getting stopped in court during Obama. There is no reason to think that America’s return to reason will not continue under Trump.
Not forgetting that Trump has repeatedly identified regulatory burdens as a major business and freedom stifling problem; along with the departments and agencies pumping out that regulatory burden.
e.g. tax rebates and credits for businesses and objects in order to force the appearance of marketability.
Or adding a carbon tax burden to all people and businesses; a massive regulatory burden?

@ Gareth…you are leaving out a crucial part of what was first stated.. Add in at the end of “…climate change is a hoax.. created by China.” That changes the message considerably. That is what Trump now claims was said in an offhand manner, a joke.

Come on man.
The Madness of crowds ends one by one as people start to question incorrect mania beliefs.
The Trump administration’s goals and proposed policies are based on logic, reason, facts, and analysis. Similar to the process a well-run business follows to solve problems and to remain competitive as opposed to chaos.
Observations and analysis does not support CAGW. Observations and analysis does not even support AGW. There is no AGW climate ‘change’ problem to solve.
Anyone care to defend CAGW with science as opposed to rhetoric?
Not much worry that the Trump administration will force the US to spend trillions of dollars on green scams which do not work.
The Trump administration will not attempt to force the US and the developed countries to send billions of dollars per year (current CAGW goal is to force $100 billion a year, rising to a trillion a year) to the UN for ‘climate change action’.
Have the trillions of dollars spent to date on ‘climate change action’ made any difference to ‘climate change’. Does the US or any other developed country have trillions of dollars to waste?
P.S. Compare the Trump administration to the EU. The EU super government has mandated that 20% of the EU budget be spent on ‘climate change’ action. Action includes lobbying and helping other countries lobby to push the madness.
Tripling the cost of electricity by forcing the US or other developed countries to spend money (there is no surplus money to spend) on green scams that do not work will make the US less competitive.
The US has a $700 billion per year trade imbalance. $500 billion/year of the $700 billion/year is with China.
The Trump administration will negotiate and make policies to try to make America great again (i.e. Bring jobs back to America, increase the number of good high paying jobs) as opposed to negotiating and creating policies that force money to be spent to fight ‘climate change’.

Dearest Gareth,
Donald Trump is the non-milquetoast leader millions of us deplorable, irredeemable, knuckle-dragging, climate denying, redneck, gun-toting, tax paying Americans have been waiting FOR DECADES to appear. You do as you like. As for me and mine, we’re going to give the man every opportunity to Make America Great Again.
Have a wonderful day!
Babsy

Thanks Babsy, and the same to you ( ps Wear gloves, they will protect your hands 🙂 )
My comments are really aimed at an odd dichotomy, the article suggests that calling Trump a denier or whatever is unfair because he certainly is not. But lots of posters here see him as the climate Messiah sent to wrest the truth from deceiving scientists. I’m not sure how the two positions can be resolved. Is the media correct in labelling him as someone who disbelieves the current theories on climate change, or is he what posters like yourself have been hoping for ‘for many’s the year,’ a sceptic in the Whitehouse?
ps I rather like your description of being a tax paying American. That obviously makes you quite different from your hero !

Gareth ==> I’d be glad to clear up your “odd dichotomy”. The basic point is that there is no dichotomy — it is a false dichotomy to insist that one is either a “climate change denier” or “not a climate change denier”. The very phrase “climate change denier” is a nasty epithet invented to vilify anyone who disagrees or disputes IPCC mandated viewpoints or recommended solutions — though almost all climate scientists have disagreements on some points (see the details of any of the IPCC reports).
President-elect Trump’s official position is that “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change.'” There is no doubt that President-elect Trump has strong objections to many of the policies put in place by President Obama as “solutions” to climate change. Differing opinions on policy are to be expected, and many on the lukewarm and skeptic side of the climate debate are pleased that Trump disagrees with Obama and intends to make some changes in policy, some of them predicted to be quite major.
This has nothing to do with two-party politics. As in all social controversies, it is a rare event to find individuals who are 100% FOR and 100% AGAINST. Only propagandists present the controversy that way, by making Straw Men for each “side” and contrasting them for propaganda purposes. In Climate Science, each individual scientist has their own set of understandings, their own uncertainties, and their own opinions. Politicians the same.Extreme polarization and extreme labels are not useful when speaking of individuals and are almost never correct.

Babsy
December 30, 2016 at 1:18 pm
I have two questions: 1) How did our forebearers survive as a nation before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment?
2) How would you know DJT has paid no tax unless you’d seen his returns?

What, exactly, is wrong about taking advantage of legal loopholes to pay as little tax as is possible? I have yet to see anyone offering to pay MORE than the absolute minimum that they can arrange to pay.

Kip Hansen
“Extreme polarization and extreme labels are not useful when speaking of individuals and are almost never correct.”
This is true Kip. Great pity it’s ignore by a significant number of posters to this site.

It seems pretty clear to me as a long time political observer that any office holder who utterly divorces himself (or herself) from the basic policy tenets that he ( or she) was elected on will find at re-election time that the support that got him (or her) there has permanently evaporated and a second term is not gonna happen. Hillary biggest anchor was that people who might have voted Democrat were convinced she was a liar.

Gareth
Trump’s commitment to the “hoax” stuff may be unclear, but as president he will have much bigger fish to fry (Supreme court, ISIS, national debt, EPA, China, Iran, N Korea…). Fighting CAGW and the IPCC are probably trivial (WUWT will have to continue the battle). HOWEVER, Trump will undoubtedly be changing the terms (and, hopefully, funding) of the argument.
Once questioning CAGW becomes “politically correct”, it will die of it’s own weight. It’s 15 minutes of fame are up.

Scott Adams’ recent skeptical blogging is perhaps another straw in the wind. Trump & Adams are speaking truth to glower.
(Attention NY Times & AP: other terms for people on our side that are more apt than doubter are: dissenter, disbeliever, contrarian, & critic. And lukewarmer (i.e., a disbeliever in the hypothesized positive feedbacks that are required to to put the C in CAGW. Most dissenters are lukewarmers. That would be the most informative term to use.)
If a half-dozen lukewarmers (or more) are appointed to influential positions by Trump, and if they in turn set up a series of debates on the topics involved in the CAGW hypothesis (including very technical debates to be voted upon by audiences of scientists with the relevant expertise), and if they give speeches in important venues, the MSM will start reporting things more even-handedly.
I believe that the main reason for their one-sidedness is that whenever they step out of line, warmist readers threaten to cancel their subs or donations (as happened after PBS aired a friendly interview of A.Watts a few years ago), and warmist letter-writers cite the endorsements of CAGW by 97% of the world’s scientific societies, or send in very technical letters to which the media’s staff have no ready answers. So there’s been great pressure on them to behave as they’ve been doing. Once lukewarmers have a bully (!) pulpit, and have demonstrated their ability to hold their own in debates, and (maybe) have a CO2-reduction plan involving mostly nuclear power and natural gas, much of the MSM ought to become become more nuanced. (Especially if a la Niña occurs.)

PS: Another part of lukewarmers’ strategy should be to hold many congressional hearings on the topic, which will make their position look more respectable, and put pressure on the MSM to avoid derogatory terms and strawman arguments. The Overton window will shift.

@Markstoval: Including “slayers” (d—ers of any effect of CO2 on climate) in congressional hearings would be very unwise from a “persuasion”-focused point of view. It would be counter-productive. So, No.

Roger
Wrong.
Let’s see if I got this straight: the CAGW side will be represented by goofballs filled with intensity, and we’re expected to send in the ballroom dancing team?
You are assuming it’s possible to pick up the CAGW turd by the clean end.

The Weekly Standard ran an excellent article recently detailing the extent of the incestuous nature of the relationship between government agencies (almost across the board, and if you doubt that, recall the Navy’s efforts to utilize ridiculously-expensive biofuel) and liberal advocacy groups. The nub of it was that nearly every agency of the federal government awards grants to liberal advocacy groups and those groups return a portion of the awards to supportive legislators and campaigns in the form of campaign donations.
Meanwhile, a considerable portion of the remaining grant money is spent lobbying for liberal causes, global warming being chief among those causes. It’s reasonable to assume that these same groups take the lead whenever someone, as you said, “step(s) out of line.” In the article, the author noted that conservative groups generally rely upon private funding, which necessitated attacking their donor base directly in an effort to defund them. Think IRS harassment and DOJ penalty-levying.
The obvious conclusion is that, to bring this to a halt, or at least into some sort of balance, the funding source for liberal advocacy groups needs to be reduced to private funding. That is, cut off the government grants that are going to advocacy groups, entirely.
By the way, I’d bet that Trump’s team is well aware of the article and is preparing to take its message to heart. At least I hope so.

Rod Everson ==> The bias in science resulting form government funding is a big issue and has been discussed over at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. more than once.
What applies to Academia applies to government agencies — the current staff have, in many cases, been hired (or retained and advanced) based on their acceptance of certain litmus-test social, scientific, and political views. My generation, and the one follow mine, University in the 70’s and early 80s, was thoroughly indoctrinated with scientifically insupportable environmental and social views — chemo-phobic, misanthropic, enforced freedoms, and mob-rule. We see the fallout in an overreaching EPA, legislated immorality, assasination-by-Twitter, etc.

If I knew how to upload a picture, I’d post the one I took Jan 16, 2009 in SW Wisconsin about 8 am of the thermometer reading -41 degrees F (Celsius too, for that matter). And the way this year is going, I might get a chance to get another one. So far, about -20 F has been the low, but then it’s only December.
I will say though that until about eight years ago the winters here were getting progressively milder for over a decade, to the point where I recall thinking “If this keeps up people will start moving back into the state.” Then someone through a switch and every winter since has seen reasonably heavy snows here, after most of the snowmobilers had given up and traded their machines for 4-wheelers. Well, the snowmobiles are back.

Rod ==> If you have the image anywhere on the internet — say, in the cloud — with a url that returns the image, you can simply place the URL in a comment and the image will show in its place. Use the Test page here at WUWT (place the URL in a comment there) to see it work before posting to a thread.
If you do not have the image on the web, you could email it to me at my first name at the domain i4 decimal net (tell me here in comments if you do) and I will take care of it for you.

Or maybe people at the newspaper are starting to get the idea that the science isn’t really settled after all.
Before Trump, all they heard was cheerleading for CAGW. Now, with Trump, they are starting to get another side of the story.

emsnews December 30, 2016 at 5:22 am
Hard to have ‘global warming is killing us’ headlines when people living in Wisconsin and Minnesota are freezing to death.
Winters in Wisconsin are a lot milder “Extreme Mildness?” (-: than they were a few decades ago. I remember winter days in the ’70s when it was ten below zero °F at noon. We’ve got a “Cold Snap” on the way next week. The Washington Post runs the headline “Rare coast-to-coast cold snap to engulf Lower 48 late next week” but when you look at their temperature map my neck of the woods won’t get below zero.

I’ll be 72 years old this February. This is some of sequence of events that has taken place over the years; atomic bomb, ice age, acid rain, I was doomed to fall out through the hole in the ozone layer, water shortage, global warming and now climate change. I can”t take any more

Here is the ‘Annual’ graph (vs. winter), 70, was cool. Of interest, Max temperatures have been steadily increasing (not accelerating), Mins have been decreasing, the Average is about flat. The only thing I can think of that would cause lows and highs to diverge like this would be Heat Island effects and less temperature moderation from forests (think farming).http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/clim-history/stations/msn/MSN-TS-ANN-T.gif

It is now becoming broadly, publicly acceptable to challenge climate model claims. All movements have an initiation, rise, acceleration, peak, and decline, following a student’s-T curve (normal distribution). It is inevitable and unstoppable. Public interest in any topic is not infinite. Think of climageddon as a fad. Most clothing fads last 2 years. This one has lasted quite a bit longer, but is still a fad. The decline is due to the behavior of populations, but is not helped by all the predictions failing to come true and the hysterical, death-and-doom rhetoric now being circulated. If you think of it, once you declare we are all soon to become extinct, there is nothing more you can say or do to ramp up the rage for a climate-based social agenda. They needed actual predictions to come true, not more screaming, as screaming is political and social, and not scientific. The rage defeats their position, as rage replaces scientific arguments gone bad. The rage rhetoric becomes the new normal, and then people become insensitized to it.

Frankly, I think the population has hit a state of adrenal fatigue with regard to “outrage.” Most of us just want to get along living our lives and be LEFT ALONE–by the Government, by ideologues, by finger-wagging nanny-state trogs who keep whipping all this fear over, at the end of the day, NOTHING.

I thought so–the newspaper is what I have always called The Milwaukee Journal (Sentinel is a recent addition, I think). Also, I have a subscription to Wisconsin Natural Resources, a fascinating bimonthly magazine put out by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources; I have read most of the articles with some thoroughness, always being attentive for references for CAGW; of late I have found few to no such references. (I was born in Wisconsin more than 74 years ago, my son was born there, and our family lived in Superior from 1972 to 1975. I always enjoyed the outdoors in that bracing climate and have been a subscriber to WisNat for many years.) I am thankful for the public change of stance.

We all know how humans work.
If we all stay quiet, the press will slowly move over to the ‘New’ interpretation, which will be that Climate Change ‘certainly exists’, but that maybe it has been a bit ‘over-emphasised’, and no one is really to blame. Then, slowly, it will get forgotten (just like the Piltdown Man fiasco), and in two or three generations, when no one can lose face over it, some studies will be produced which say that the scientific authorities back in the 2000s were stupid, and aren’t we lucky that science corrected itself before any real harm was done.
If, however, we make a noise about it, the die-hards will cling to the belief that we are all about to die, and will undertake all kinds of extreme political activity intended to force their beliefs on the politicians. We see this happening with Brexit in the UK as the Remainers try to force a reappraisal of the Leave vote through the courts, and in the US where we had the unedifying spectacle of crowd-funded recounts, and the strange process of blaming the Russians (Commies?) for doing ‘something technical’ (we’re not sure what) to let the Republicans in….
What a world we live in!!

Excellent comment Dodgy,
Now I think about it when I voted to get the hell out of the EU by postal vote I now think that President Putin was controlling my actions and thought-projecting command phenomena……….
Yes, I’m convinced……Those damned commies….
Has anyone else suffered similarly?

DG, the MSM is like the proverbial leopard. It won’t be changing it’s spots anytime soon. Maybe toning down their rhetoric about the coming “anthropological induced global armagedon”. Till they get a handle on how hard Trump is going to hit the rentseekers and “witch doctors” that support it.
And the Russians?
They did no more than reveal what the Democrats and Clinton were up to. (If it was them) Something an unbiased media would have and should bave been all over. The media by now shouting ” the Russians are coming” and making a big deal about Russian hacking. (Asange says his information came from internal democrat leaks) Is doing little more than attempting to hide their own failings. A failing now being noticed by all!

Obama spent much of the last year lecturing the British how to vote on BREXIT, and openly campaigning for the opposition party in the recent Israeli election.
So he doesn’t have a lot of room to complain about Russian interference in our election. (If indeed such interference actually existed.)

The last time I checked, the Democratic National Committee was not an official U. S. Government body. Hacking them is no different than hacking the Boy Scouts of America, or the offices of the Red Cross. Yet, the reaction from the White House and the press is as if the NSA or FBI was successfully hacked, and State Secrets stolen.
Plus, as has been pointed out, the only thing revealed in the raid was the truth about the DNC’s effort to keep Bernie out and Hillary in, and various other nefarious dealings involving the Clinton Foundation. Hell, we already knew that the RNC was doing their best to keep Trump out — they admitted that in public. Even if the RNC had been successfully penetrated, I can’t imagine what horrible information about The Donald could have been released that hadn’t already been trumpeted from the highest peaks. (Pun intended.)

PS: A grand total of nobody claimed he was armed to the teeth with WMDs. We know for a fact that Saddam had chemical weapons, he used them on the Iranians and his own people.
With regards to nuclear, nobody ever claimed he had weapons, just weapons programs.

MarkW, your attempts to revise history is dependent on no one here being old enough to remember Rice’s warnings about “mushroom clouds over American cities”, or Blair claiming Iraqi nuclear warheads could reach the UK in 45 minutes.
No one cared about the chemical weapons he had used against Iran more than a decade previously. Not did they care about small time chemical weapon caches without delivery system. The war against Iraq was sold on the basis of Hussein’s Iraq being an existential threat to the USA and other Western countries.

It will be ridiculously easy to debate the warmists in the future: demand they wear swim suits and we get to wear parkas and do the debates outside, in winter, where it matters: in either Wisconsin or western NY by the Great Lakes. I guarantee no one on the warm side will show up.

D.G. – correct and very insightful.
This slow-letting-go happened with Eugenics. Everyone was on-board, even the big universities and corporate think-tanks, until it was (rightly so) determined to be racist. (I use that term carefully, because it is so over-used today).
This slow-letting-go happened with the global cooling scare in the 1970’s … that one is still being walked-back.
It has also been said that science progresses one death at a time.
Only when all the current fanatical alarmists have gone on to their final reward will there be moderation or reversal of the CAGW meme.

Forget Trump.
The real change was the fact that the pollsters got Brexit and the US election very wrong.
The reason no public figure was willing to let the obvious questions about the thermo-apocalypse be aired was that they thought it was public suicide to do so. You would be seen as a loony fringe by almost everybody.
And it has been for many celebrities. In the UK even Zoe Ball’s dad can’t get on the BBC.
But now that the public can’t be predicted a whole new range of questions can be asked.
Look at the Scott Adams page. It matters not if he’s a sceptic or a true-believer. He’s willing to openly ask the questions.
And asking questions leaves the emperor very exposed in those new clothes of his.

“The reason no public figure was willing to let the obvious questions about the thermo-apocalypse be aired was that they thought it was public suicide to do so.”
That’s a good point. Why didn’t the Democrats push this, to them, so very important issue during the elections, especially since they were going up against a skeptic of CAGW? The Democrats barely even brought the subject up.

“Damn Russians did it to the Dems…
If the Ruskies could prevent Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin, they could CERTAINLY stop a discussion of CAGW. How hard can this be?”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, Javert. The Ruskies are tricky. Making Hillary bark like a dog was probably one of their hacks, too.

The trap that many people fall into is that they believe a person is a 100% adherent of the accepted science of climate change, or you are a 100% opponent. It’s really not like that. The vast majority of people are somewhere along a line from complete opponent to complete agreement.
Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change. But that does not mean I am not still sceptical about some aspects of the science and claims. I would bet that even the most hard nosed sceptic would still believe that some of the science based on observation is probably correct, while having substantial reservation about much of the conclusions.
Black and white thinking is what bedevils climate science. As regular posters will know, I am a believer in mainstream climate science and a bit of an old lefty. But I like partaking on this site because it challenges my beliefs, makes me think, and sometimes alters how I feel about an issue. If you only debate in an echo chamber you never learn. if you buck the trend you have to put up with moronic insults from those who have nothing constructive to say, but in amongst the trash there are jewels of wisdom.

“Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change.”
It is true that human activity has impacted the climate. Look at land use in the western US for example. Or look at large cities and their impact. But many propagandists claim that “mankind plays a role in climate change” to get the low information person believing they mean by driving their SUV. Most dishonest.

“I suppose the question is, where do we draw the line between local and global impact?”
The role of CO2 is so tiny that it makes your question meaningless other than for a good troll.
“Climate Sensitivity” to CO2 is very near zero and possibly negative. One data point is that CO2 has been at least triple what it is now without any “global warming”. ( or would you argue that only man-made CO2 counts?)

“Meanwhile, skeptics/climate realists are believers in facts and actual evidence – you know, the stuff of actual science.”
Possibly you could add ” In my opinion”
There is a lot more subjectivity in the interpretation of evidence and confirmation of bias than people really understand. Mine is a subjective opinion drawn from the evidence I think is likely correct. It fits in with my view of good research and reality. But it is still my opinion, just as your is your reflection of your world view.

‘I would bet that even the most hard nosed sceptic would still believe that some of the science based on observation is probably correct, while having substantial reservation about much of the conclusions.’
I quite agree! We believe that the observation-based science shows a LOW CS; We believe that observation-based studies demonstrate that Negative feedbacks predominate, if only slightly; We believe that observation-based studies conclude that hurricanes are NOT getting more severe or more numerous. And so on, and so forth.
And yes, we agree with Your assessment that the claims of disaster based upon AGW are pretty much garbage. Especially with the observation-based evidence that the world has been Much warmer, Very recently- the MWP, RWP, Minoan, HCO….

I totally agree ClimateOtter.
Catastrophisation is the bane of good climate science. Every time someone make a prediction that so and so is happening, and it fails to materialise, mainstream climate science loses a few more supporters.
What I find interesting though is the extent of which exaggeration, where there is little proof, seems to have become mainstreamed. In the last US election there were claims of millions of votes being cast by unregistered voters, Islamists were the number one threat to US citizens, that inoculations cause Autism, none of which has any basis in good evidence. But they do the rounds on a daily basis and far too many people accept the stories without actually checking. I think Willis has written an interesting article on his site regarding false news and exaggeration undermining good process in all fields of human endeavour.

Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change.

Gareth P, how is it possible for you to even entertain such a thought ….. when in actuality, …. you really don’t have a clue as to how many, the number of, climate scientists there are around the world, ….. and worse yet, …… you are completely in “the dark” as to exactly what those climate scientists actually believe.

While not defending Gareth, I have to note that mankind (modern civilization) can
be playing “a part” in climate change, be it at 95% or just 5%.
Since the advent of crop irrigation and early aqueducts several thousand years ago,
man has been altering the environment. Those efforts tended to be localized in
their impact.
Now comes the “Urban Island” effect on temperature measurements and regional
rain runoff. Until a few years ago our collective “climate scientists” wouldn’t even
acknowledge the Urban Island effect until they had to hide it inside “homogenization”
of cells in their models. (h/t to SteveMc, Anthony, JudithC, etc.)
Current climate science can’t and doesn’t want to put a number (X%) on humanity’s
impact on weather and the climate. They can’t and won’t allow factors like solar
input across all bands into their formulae despite the shifts in sol’s output::http://www.spaceweather.com/images2016/30dec16/hmi200.gif andhttp://www.spaceweather.com/images2016/28dec16/ch_strip1.png
Personally I’d go with man’s “part” at 5%.

I’m not sure “many people” fall into that trap, but it is true that many debates are pushed into that trap by fanatical adherents of both sides.
Immigration is a great example. I don’t know anybody who thinks totally open-door, unlimited immigration is what we should have, and I don’t know anybody who thinks no immigration at all is the answer. In other words, we all think “some” immigration is good. So we are actually arguing about what “some” means, but you wouldn’t know that from all the name-calling.
I do believe that much more of the problem comes from the Progressive/Left side of thee debates however. On so many issues, from climate change, to immigration, worker’s rights, welfare and so on, the Progressive Left takes out a black and white, rigid position that too often prevents sensible discussion.

Good point Tim, the left tend to hold a take or leave it stance, and the right tend to over egg the problems . I tend to think a review of both arguments is useful, then make your mind up based on what evidence you think has validity. The problem is when you have two sides who both lie to the voter. The results then tend to be as valid as flipping a coin.

“But I like partaking on this site because it challenges my beliefs, makes me think, and sometimes alters how I feel about an issue.”
I feel the same way about this website, Gareth, and I like your open-minded attitude. We all need to be open to new information, and go where the facts take us.

TA
Exactly how is Gareth demonstrating “open minded-ness” with a passive-egressive statement like “Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change”?
What exactly has the guy committed to? Forever being undecided?

Javert Chip December 30, 2016 at 5:06 pm wrote: “TA
Exactly how is Gareth demonstrating “open minded-ness” with a passive-egressive statement like “Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change”?”
Well, he did say “probably”, not “absolutely.” 🙂
I just thought Gareth’s attitude was a welcome change from some on the other side, who are convinced they know everything there is to know about humans, CO2 and the Earth’s climate. Gareth expressed doubts and a desire to understand the true situation, it seemed to me. I think that’s a good thing, and the right direction for all of us, and should be encouraged.
We can disagree without being disagreeable. At least, I hope so, and will do my part.

I appreciate your comment, “Black and white thinking is what bedevils climate science.” Richard Lindzen is considered a ‘denier’ yet in his own words there are many things he has no objections with in the mainstream view as he explains in a 5 minute video. It’s seems like most of the coverage we hear is between the ~10% on either end of the spectrum which is mostly political. Anyway I’ll let him tell it in his words: https://www.prageru.com/courses/environmental-science/climate-change-what-do-scientists-say

I believe that 97% of climate “scientists” are democrats/socialists and therefore corrupt liars. I don’t believe a single word they say just as I don’t believe a single word that O’Bama or Clinton says.

Gareth
You say: “…Personally I tend to think the vast majority of climate scientists are probably correct in that humans play a part in climate change….”. Could you put anymore non-quantitive, passive, subjective qualifiers (tend to think, vast majority, probably correct, play a part) in a single 23-word statement?
Wow! Nothing says standing up for, well, nothing, better than saying nothing. Dude – you achieved nirvana on that one.
Assuming you are married, how did you respond when the minister asked you to say “I do” – “Ok; I’ll give it a shot. I mean I’ll try real hard, unless she gets sick or something much better comes along.”?

There is nothing wrong with expressing some uncertainly on an issue as complex and untested as climate science.
If Gareth wants to keep his position on the debate fluid as he continues to explore more information, then kudos to him: he is approaching the issue from a scientific standpoint and not a political one.
There is no deadline for Gareth, and I’d rather see him take the time to make a well-informed decision than rush him in to a ‘with us or against us’ position. Recall that there is a lot of information to sift through on both sides of the issue, and figuring out what is factual science and what is political deceit takes time.

Dearest Gareth,
Please take a quantity of air, measure its temperature and CO2 concentration. Add CO2 to the previously measured volume, record the new temperature, and get back to us with the results.
Babsy

Babsy
“Please take a quantity of air, measure its temperature and CO2 concentration. Add CO2 to the previously measured volume, record the new temperature, and get back to us with the results.”
If that’s what you think anyone is saying you are mistaken. There is radiative forcing which you can google.

What we’re told is that man, by using petroluem products which creates CO2 and that is expelled into the atmosphere, will cause the temperature of the atmosphere to increase. This increase in temperature will cause the glaciers to melt, the seas to rise, and lead to the end of the world. Dire straits except no one can demonstrate the mechanism by which this catastrophe actually happens.

Good on you Andy.
The old hands here and A.W. personally know I am not shy about expressing myself about perceived climate alarmist exaggerators. I have frequently been slapped down. Snip, snip and snip again. Like you, assuming he’s not a very clever troll, I have no problem with his stance. If his words here are sincere he is an example of the exact kind of person we need to convert to skepticism. After all, A.W. was once a believer.

I would like to think comments on this topic
come to pass in spades but going on our locsl
media here in Australia I think a change of mood is going to be a long time coming
In particular as there is no shortage of weather anywhere the press here allow ingnoramouses
to write about any change in the weather as
being evidence of climate change

What a flooded garage in Melbourne (What no drains in the sublevel-garage? Stupid drivers trying to drive on flooded roads (Hilarious watching people trying to drive through at least 800mm deep water) and a fire, exacerbated buy…you guessed it…extreme heat!). The Aussie MSM is a laugh in the extreme…

To correct the above : this election there were 4 political parties in America’s election system.
In the past there have been periods of three party politics (Civil War, Wilson’s first win, Dixiecrats
after WWII)

Arthur4563
What’s your point?
This website (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html) documents 27 of 38 presidential elections from 1868 (after Civil War) had 3rd (and often 4h and more) party participation.
Ten of the 2-party elections have been in the last 18 presidential elections (post WW2).
Incorrectly, the website DOES NOT show the Libertarian and Socialist parties in the 2016 election – 2016 is counted as a 2-party election. I HAVE NOT ADJUSTED THE NUMBERS TO CORRECT FOR 2016.

M Courtney mentions polls getting Brexit and Trump wrong. Wikileaks 100 most damaging leaks number 24 is about Democrats trying to fix the polls in order to convince Trump voters they were so far behind they were wasting their time.http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/
I have no idea if anything similar happened in the UK pre-Brexit. Many people surmised that people on the right were embarrassed to admit they were on the right and that was why the polls got the last UK election (where the Conservatives won a large majority contrary to poll predictions) and Brexit so wrong.
I know Mr Hansen prefers not to have tit for tat right or left comments here. This is about whether polls were wrong because the right was embarrassed to admit it, or because polls were being fixed.
It is relevant to the comment that now it is politically more acceptable to question climate change, and that therefore we may see a change in how contrary views are reported. If the “embarrassment” argument was the correct answer, then we may see polls on many issues reflect better on right or left views. Again, right or left is relevant to climate change because polls (again) show Republicans and Conservatives more likely to question cagw than Democrats or Labour supporters.

back in 1953 or so, experiments were done on ‘conformity’.
it was found that only about 10% of individuals would openly buck a concensus.
it was found that most people would go along with obviously wrong ideas rather than risk some anticipated opprobrium.
it was found, however, that if a single person bucked the group, the test subject was much much more inclined to state his own contrary perception.
1 confederate mattered (lookin at wuwt, here)
it was also found that an individual by himself gave his honest answer – no group around to influence him.
i think polls are essentially an expression of a ‘public position’ and subject to the influence of others.
but in the voting booth- you’re all alone.

“Except that when the polling center calls, people are alone in their home. How is that subject to group influence?***”
Out where I live if you said you favored Trump people called you a racist and branded you as uneducated and/or ignorant. You had to be careful what you said to strangers. In some cases you even had to be careful when discussing Trump with close relatives. The Progressive are generally pretty intolerant people. They are the modern Puritans.
Several times I had pollsters call me at home and there were always clues as to how they wanted me to answer. Sometimes it was the biased phrasing of the question. Sometimes it was that subtle judgemental pause in the pollster’s voice when I said I favored Trump or that I was a conservative. Most blatently it was having a pollster with a foreign accent or an African American accent asking questions about topics like immigration. I felt uncomfortable responding. After responding to a few early polls I stopped responding to pollsters who called my house.

I wonder also if there is polling skewing due to who might be more, or less, excited about answering questions and giving their opinion to a polling agency. In other words, folks who have been PC’d to death on their particular views may be less inclined to be open. And what about people who scale more towards narcissistic, would they be more inclined to sit through a bunch of questions on what their opinion is? And does any of this bear in any way on political preference?

Keith ==> “It is relevant to the comment that now it is politically more acceptable to question climate change, and that therefore we may see a change in how contrary views are reported.”
Absolutely correct. This is my view as well — with the election of a President ambivalent to climate change dogma, making appointments of cabinet members and agency heads that not only have not passed the pro-AGW-litmus test but quite the opposite, it becomes easier and safer (politically, socially, professionally) to state one’s true opinions — and, as in the case of the Wisconsin DNR, make a public statement that is more scientifically correct.

What has been forgotten, or shunted aside, is the huge impact a belief in AGW has already had on our world.
We are driving smaller cars, and it had nothing to do with our wants, needs, nor the manufacturers desires. Our appliances are less efficient than they used to be (imagine that). International building codes mandate an R value and a tightness so severe that we are building “sick” homes.
We’ve intentionally abandoned centuriesworth of inexpensive energy, costing lives and untold billions (milliards for you Brits) of the average western peoples. We’ve abandoned the jobs and riches that manufacturing brings.
ALL because of the belief that the CO2 molecule will destroy our planet.
Imagine if the population at large suddenly discovered that all was for nought, and that we had sacrificed the comfort, convenience and freedoms that science could truly bring us because of shoddy, and perhaps intentionally misleading “science”.

It’s a short billion, or a thousand millions, traditionally called a milliard. UK practice has been to use the long billion – a million millions – but US practice has mostly won the day on that one. We haven’t officially used long billions since the late 70s.

Forget 100W, I’ll just be happy when I can have soft-tone coloured bulbs again. Ambience! Relaxation!
I’m now imagining a Monty Python sketch:
“Who’d a thought thirty years ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking hot tea out of an electric kettle?”
“Aye, in them days we’d a’ been glad to have the price of a kW hour of wind turbine output.”
“A SPINNING wind turbine.”
“Without subsidies”
etc /// author talent limit reached/exceeded.

Dermot O’Logical ==> I recently bought colored “Party Light Bulbs” — 25 watt bulbs in green, yellow, green, and blue. Very nice — they are allowed because of the low wattage and being “specialty bulbs” escape regulation.
On the other hand, you can buy almost anything on the Internet…regardless of regulations. Buy your bulbs and enjoy.
On our boat, we make out own electricity — wind, solar, and diesel generation and use it as we wish.

I don’t know, I kinda like the new soft white (2700K) LED bulbs. The power savings is enormous (9W vs 60W) and they look exactly the same. The cost has come way down, too, though they still are more expensive than incandescents.
I have two large rooms with recessed lighting, and there are eight on one room and ten the other, so my power use has gone from 18 X 60W = 1080W to 18 X 9 = 162W. I do notice the rooms are colder in winter, though, as we’ve lost the extra warming power from the filaments.

James ==> On our boat, I have replaced all the lighting with LED bulbs and fixtures — electricity is at a premium when one is using wind and solar stored in lead acid batteries. For background lighting, we use warm white closely-spaced “Christmas Tree” LED lights strung around the perimeter of the main cabin reflecting off of the white overhead (these are 120 VAC, inverter powered) . This provides even lighting and a festive touch. Gooseneck reading lights (also LED) provide the additional light for books and charts.

Marky. I agree with you: not all agw effects are bad. I am only upset by the amount of money that have been wrongly spent on wrong project. Coal burning is an exemple. I can live with co2 coming from coal, and up to concentration like those encounter in Apollo 13 LEM. But others products coming from coal are bad, and are facts. Trump should divert a lot of money from agw fighting budget to coal subproducts recovery.

I don’t accept that present warming is anything other than natural variability but the IPCC says that up to 1.8C of warming globally is generally beneficial. I don’t get what all these Warmists are worked up about. Perhaps 1.9C is catastrophic but that seems unlikely. I live in Canada, one of the coldest countries on the planet. What the Hell the idiots who run my country think they are fighting is beyond me! Too stupid for words! We are deficit spending to boost the economy and then they are turning around and applying a carbon tax. You can’t make up stuff this dumb unless you’re in government.

don’t be so sure of the manufacturers wants. all that extra virtue signalling emissions control crap on modern cars is added value to them. who lobbied for it in the first place ? , partly as a barrier to new competitors entering the market .
in the case of diesels it actually reduces fuel efficiency,which is stupidity in itself. cleaner more efficient engines are a no brainer, what we ended up with was something heading toward such complexity it borders on madness.

George McFly ==> with the government controlled media, under the British system (BBC, CBC, ABC), outside the US, the change will be slower as the rank-and-file journalists and administrators, program managers, and all have been selected/appointed based on their conformance with the obligatory politically correct belief system. The problem here is that they actually believe that they are right about CAGW. They have been mis-educated/indoctrinated in the Universities and their belief system buoyed by professional rewards for “right thinking”. The same is true in the US with NPR/PBS. They will be slow to change, they will fight back with even more strident attacks….they will eventually be overcome by the facts and back down slowly.

Stan ==> Thank you. I usually do much more in depth pieces, this was a “quicky” to re-emphasize the original study, prompted by Jane Brody’s NY Times reminder about cold being more dangerous than heat.

The test will come when what happens next in the ENSO cycle.
Presently, we have not seen the present ENSO cycle complete with a La Nina. Since ENSO is unpredictable, we do not know what will come next, but IF there is a La Nina in 2017 going through into 2018, it is likely that satellite data will cool (this data set is less sensitive to La Ninas than it is to El Ninos, possible because of warm air convection) and the pause will reappear, but it will then be over 20 years in duration. IF this happens, model discrepancy between satellite observations will be even greater. The question will be is will this issue be addressed by the IPCC and how?
People seem to forget that if Trump is to bring back employment to the so called rust states, then he has to pull back/ignore AGW commitments. He has no choice in this, if he is to create jobs in coal and energy intensive industries and thereby keep his commitment to the voters in the rust states.
I do not think it at all likely that he will ignore the voters in the rust states, and I therefore expect his administration to be extremely sceptical of AGW, and to do as much as possible to undermine the credibility of the so called ‘science’ behind AGW..
I expect Trump to become emboldened should a strong La Nina develop.
PS. I am not saying that a strong La Nina will develop, but merely speculating on what will happen should it develop in 2017. A cold US winter this year (whilst only weather) will not do him any harm either.

Most of the public cared not one whit about climate change. They may say they care, but their actions clearly show they do not.
The ones that care are the vocal minority. These are part of the social justice warriors now. These are the people who make you conform to their viewpoint, or ELSE! Since they took useless majors in college, they cannot find meaningful work so they are looking for some cause to rally behind to make their life meaningful. Thus they have a lot of free time of their hands. They are the modern useful idiots. They are the ones who care about climate change. And they are still the minority.
The other ones who care are the ones who learned how to make a lot of easy money off CAGW theory. They, too, are in the vocal minority. They are vocal because they are afraid they might actually have to work for a living. A cornered animal can either fight or take flight. Some will take flight into other jobs, these are the ones who actually have some skill to offer society. Many will fight as long as they can because you cannot live in a mansion as a burger flipper at McDonald’s, which is the only other skill they have.

I can reasonably foresee public hysteria about CAGW dying down, for a number of reasons, but mainly because none of the predicted CAGW disasters have occurred. You can only keep hysteria going for so long without an external impetus before it dies a natural death.
However, I feel that this might be the right time to introduce to the general public an opposite point of view – that far from having an excess of CO2 in our atmosphere, we actually live in a CO2-impoverished atmosphere. If another little ice age were to occur, we could easily see CO2 levels drop to around 300 ppm (they were 280 ppm during the previous LIA). Crop yields at this level would be so low that we would have difficulty feeding all 7 billion of us (or possibly 9 or 10 billion if the UN population predictions come about).
Far from reducing CO2 output, I suggest we should be encouraging it. Will rising CO2 levels cause global temperature increases? Possibly, but only to a mild extent, and probably well within the natural variation we have seen in past climate optimums.
We already have an organization called 350.org dedicated to reducing CO2 levels. I suggest we set up a new organization called 1000.org, dedicated to increasing CO2 levels.

Bravo Wisconsin! Hopefully the truth can find its way into neighbouring jurisdictions.
Here in Ontario it’s not just the ruling party (who initiated the Green Energy Act), along with the two other political parties and the majority of the educated class they all believe we need to “decarbonize” the economy…etc.,etc.
On this side of the Great Lakes the alarmist narrative has very strong legs, if you are not on board the good ship AGW you are politically irrelevant.

phil brisley ==> This is exactly the situation that I think/hope is going to undergo a change now that the US President(elect) is definitely NOT a rabid pro-CAGW fanatic.
The reasoning is: If a guy can be elected President of the US without being required to repeat IPCC CAGW talking points by rote, then maybe I can express my opinions without fear of losing my job, maybe my state DNR can issue a scientifically correct (as opposed to politically correct) statement about climate change, maybe I can do my research and report my actual findings without a de rigueur AGW plank.

Kip Hanson, thanks for the response and keep up the good fight.
Far too often I read in the MSM ridiculous claims concerning AGW. They say the climate is changing and we are the cause. They insist we must stop adding the heat trapping gases that are dangerously warming the planet. And we the people believe this junk…this Monday Ontario is implementing a carbon tax on gasoline and heating fuel. Happy New Year!
Carbon dioxide does not trap heat, it actually convects it (think hot air rises). Also, carbon dioxide does not trap radiation, it absorbs and re-radiates it at a wavelength corresponding with temperatures found at the Top of the Atmosphere (TOA) which is around minus 50 degrees C. The law of conservation is radiation in from the sun equals radiation out at TOA and the evidence there’s an imbalance as a result of the enhanced greenhouse effect is nothing more than inconclusive guesswork.
The radiative transfer equation provides a degree (pun not intended) of mathematical certainty, but so far, the atmosphere – a turbulent, coupled, non-linear chaotic system – has shown itself impossible to numerically model.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is an unproven theory that has little basis in science and people who don’t ask themselves the simple questions are deluding themselves.

Hopefully these are the first signs of cracks in the facade, with many more to come. Lots of good reasons listed here for this new language; funding concerns, dooms days that never materialize, interest T-curves, etc. After following the debate for many years, and eventually aligning with the skeptics, I find this a moment of cautious celebration.
Imagine how different the picture would be today without the new media, and sites like WattsUpWithThat, IceCap, IceAgeNow, etc. They’ve started a snowball (ha) that is gaining speed. No wonder the Warmists are out to crush Free Speech.
Free Speech – cherish it, defend it!

My stance is simply this: None of the real movers and shakers behind the ‘useful idiots’, ever believed in climate change of the man made sort. It was and is a political and commercialmarketing narrative.
By voting in Trump, a new version of what the ‘stupid ordinary man’ is thinking has emerged, in the minds of those who see it that way. AGW doesn’t have traction. So it will be binned, and the useful idiots like Monbiot, and so on who promulgated it, will be quietly dumped, or paid off in some way.
Climate change, the agenda, will never be admitted to be wrong. It will simply fade from public consciousness as the next campaign (probably some kind of ‘global social justice’/migration initiative) replaces it as The Thing Everyone Is Talking About. Climate out of vogue, social justice back in.

I agree. It’s always had an aura of sophistry that non-critical thinkers can cling to and use as a weapon to bash their political enemies. Not to mention the religious overtones and zealotry (“We’re Saving The Planet! What could be more important than that? How could you possibly disagree? You must be evil and therefore need to be destroyed!”).

I’ve been reading “Yahoo News” articles frequently. Check out a POLITICAL story, such as Trump’s cabinet selections, and there are maybe 2000 or 3000 posts. On the other hand, global warming scare stories have maybe 100 or 200 posts. Based on that “Yahoo” sampling method, only a small fraction of the news reading public is concerned about CAGW.

Want a good laugh? I was just browsing around over at George Mason Univ. center for climate change communication. Gosh they are true believers, just consider their “about” paragraph: “As a result of human activity – primarily the burning of fossil fuels – the earth’s climate is becoming dangerously disrupted and destabilized. Our mission is to develop and apply social science insights to help society make informed decisions that will stabilize the earth’s life-sustaining climate, and prevent further harm from climate change. To achieve this goal, our center engages in three broad activities: we conduct unbiased communication research; we help government agencies, civic organizations, professional associations, and companies apply social science research to improve their public engagement initiatives; and we train students and professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to improve public engagement with climate change.”
Such wonderfully crafted statements. I love the “unbiased communication research” claim. What in the heck do they see that is “dangerously disrupted” about the climate?

John Boles ==> The liberal/progressive universities will be some of the last groups to undergo change. Many of today’s senior professors were teaching assistants in the 60s battling the war in Viet Nam, rioting in the streets, occupying campus buildings, smoking pot and dropping acid in the Quad. They have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the CAGW/Environmental movement and are True Believers, passing on their world view to our impressionable youth. There are none on campus to present contrary views — such contrary views are not allowed and speakers are dis-invited if their views do not match those held by the politically correct.

It was interesting that climate change came up only once in the US presidential debates, when HRC brought it up and Donald Trump deflected the point. The Democrats apparently thought that depicting Trump as a reprobate was a more winning strategy than running on CAGW, which a fair number of Canadian and European politicians still are.

Leo and Alan are exactly right. In infonomic terms, the public perception of any issue is determined by the total potentiation of all the neural networks in all the brains of the population. As both Dr. Adrian Bejan and Scott Adams say, people are programmed to pay attention to what is immediately in front of them and what carries the most “information energy.” It is impossible to maintain a high level of potentiation on any topic over time.
Predicting the ebb and flow of information in society is on the level of predicting the climate – society is a coupled semi-chaotic system, etc. Small input changes, like the ones Kip has alertly pointed out, can make major changes downstream. I predict that the AGW bubble is already collapsing and will do so much faster than anticipated.
Trump’s reaction to the supposed Russian hacking of the election is telling – unlike the traditional politicians engaging in endless pontificating about retaliation, sanctions and such, Trump just says, how about we get on with our lives (and the things that really matter). These kind of simple statements are incredibly powerful.

‘Odumber’s saber rattling” – ha ha.
I doubt the Kremlin has ever cared what Odummber thinks (if that’s the right term) about much of anything other than if he will actually sign sanctions legislation.
Odumber is a wus; why would the Russians want him (or for that matter, Hillary) out of the way? Like they say in Syria, N Korea & Iran “nothing could possibly be better than Odumber”.

The real test will be when National Geographic stops prominently displaying idiot articles like their recent one by Leonardo Dicaprio flaunting his high school laureates and expounding on climate change. Even my favorite magazine, Astronomy, bows to the CO2 gods. Of course there is plenty of consensus science in cosmology as well. And I miss my Scientific American subscription which I cancelled long ago when they jumped on the moron bang wagon. Unfortunately, since the dawn of climate science, such as it now is, I believe tha all science has taken a real hit and now exhibits its own degree of fake news.

Jim G1 ==> NatGeo has become, unfortunately, the “Popular Science” of our day — losing its original scientific rigor and swinging wildly to the side of political correctness. Like NPR, PBS and the like, its ranks have been selected for their world view which must conform to the most liberal and progressive thoughts of the day.
Scientific American has become a double oxymoron — it does not embody the ethics of Science nor the values of America.

Rob Bradley ==> The deterioration of scientific standards of both NatGeo and SciAm is a matter of opinion, but I am certainly not the only person to express such. It is not a single-issue matter.
SciAm showed its true colors in the Mims incident years ago. Scientific Political Correctness trumps qualifications, ability, and religious freedom. (Thus, its very name is a double oxymoron).
NatGeo has been a scientific joke for years — jumping on whatever band-wagon issue will sell magazines.
NatGeo is still the torch-bearer for scientific and nature photography.

Rob, I can assure you that Kip is not in the minority.
The claim that a vast majority of scientists believe that CO2 is a strong enough green house gas to cause serious problems has been well and thoroughly refuted.
Of course those who make their living off of scaring others keep pushing the lie.

MARKW, waving your hands doesn’t mean much of anything. When scientific studies on the views of the climate scientist cohort align with your opinion, I’ll consider your view that Kip is not a member of the minority. Up until then, if you think blog posts refute existing studies…..good luck in your science career.
Kip, posting a link to a blog that is a member of the “echo chamber” you inhabit as evidence? Really? Are you kidding?

Bit chilly,
My point exactly in previous comment, science in general, is already the looser as so called climate science has already desecrated much of it by becoming the home for consensus science, poor statistical anaysis and politically motivated funding. Skeptical science is out the window. Though in reality skeptics have always had a hard time being heard.

“Javert Chip December 30, 2016 at 5:53 pm wrote: “Wow! We seem to have a whole new set of trolls.”
There do seem to be a few new names popping up on the alarmist side at this website. I suppose that might happen because some people see the way it looks like Trump is going with CAGW, and they don’t like it, and have decided to weigh in on the subject publicly, and what better place to do that than WUWT.
I suppose we will get some organized alarmist pushback, too, as the debate heats up.
It’s a teaching moment. 🙂

“Even my favorite magazine, Astronomy, bows to the CO2 gods.”
Astronomy doesn’t do much preaching on CO2. I have seen a couple of off-hand remarks on the subject by the editor, and he wrote an entire opinion article that chided CAGW skeptics a little, and I saw one letter to the editor complaining about the editor bringing CAGW into the magazine. Other than that, I haven’t seen much of anything about CAGW in Astronomy.
That’s a good thing because I cancelled my subscriptions to Scientific American and Science News specifically because they kept pushing the CAGW theme even though they never provided any evidence of such.
I started off interested in the subject and what they had to say, and each new article on CAGW that would come out I would eagerly read hoping to finally get some proof that CAGW was real, and I *never* read an article that provided that proof.
After I realized how they were playing the game (speculating instead of proving), I started getting angry every time I would see another such article, to the point that I finally cancelled that reading material.
I can see where Scientific American and Science News would include CAGW in their coverage since they are general science magazines, although I disagreed with their take on the subject, but Astronomy has no excuse for introducing CAGW into their magazine. They should stick to astronomy. If they ever do go on a CAGW crusade, I’ll be cancelling that subscription, too. The Astronomy editor should keep his opinions on CAGW to himself and out of the magazine.

About 2 years ago, I sent a communication to Environment Canada asking what the budget for climate change was within that government department. I received a reply that stated that there was no budget nor were there any expenditures concerning climate change studies. Recently, I listened to a report on the climate in which the person interviewed was referred to as the representative of Environment and Climate Change Canada.
More brazen now under Trudeau than they dared to be under Harper, hopefully this tendency can be reversed with a good example from our 11th province to the south 😉

The NYT is and will always be complete sh/t. I would not let my dog do his business on the NYT for fear his paws would get infected. That they may have changed their style manual to back slightly away from their progressive warmist rhetoric changes nothing. The NYT is #FakeNews

I just saw the article in the news and came here to see if you’ve caught it and you did! WOOHOO!
As a resident of WI, I can tell you this is fantastic news. I know more than a few in the DNR and they are mostly skeptics.
This is the 1st step, even if it is a CYA move to keep federal funding in light of the political arena, next is the University of WI system. It’ll trickle or possibly flood down the food chain.

More funding to those who were marginalised for their views about natural variability. Segregate those sufferers and bring their stories of sufferings to limelights. They deserve special recognition for their service to science. Their integrity to science should be rewarded with enough funding to carry their research ideas. They should receive similar support like other researchers for career progression and never be secluded from the system.
It is the time now !!

I think there is an opportunity here to bombard local and regional governments and news organizations with a one-two punch as follows:
” Given nearly twenty years of no warming trend globally and Wisconsin and Washington opening the door to official questioning of the reality of Climate Change, what steps is your organization taking to keep pace with the evolving new thinking? More and more scientists are expressing skepticism about the IPCC position.”

As a “climate war” veteran of ten years, fighting mostly in the non-scientist realms of social media, I cannot stress enough how horribly I felt/feel the scientist end of the battles going on “above” me kept screwing up by accepting and adopting obviously inappropriate lingo . . it must have been a thousand times that I wanted to SCREAM at the geek friendlies to stop using idiotic nonsensical terms like “climate skeptic” in there discussions, about themselves, and people like me.
No, geeks, I wanted to tell you, I am not skeptical of climate, and neither are you . . and to denounce *you* for labeling us like that . . you crippled the efforts to support what you were doing, by blithely accepting nonsensical labels, I believe, and this war might have been effectively won back in 2009-10, or as the “pause” stretched into the high teens, had you simply used the opportunity “climate-gate” afforded us to dump the dopey talk-talk . .
Down there, in those trenches, I held my ground . . and it often worked (I sensed) to get people to think more carefully about what the mass media was blabbering at us . . but I sure wished I had some more authoritative voices to quote, rather than so many voices mimicking the grotesque mislabeling . .

An even more counterproductive label, I feel, is “Climate science skeptic” . . It makes the IPCC/CAGW clan into climate science itself, linguistically speaking. . but it was climate science that made me skeptical of them!! . . They are NOT climate science, so it makes no sense (unless you’re truly desperate to save on key strokes ; ) to label yourself a climate science skeptic . . it just makes you look anti-science or dumb, frankly, to many civilians . . and quite possibly some not too involved scientists . .

I appreciate Anthony’s efforts to keep party politics out the issue. The problem with that is that this issue has been purely political for about 20 years now, starting at the moment that Bill Clinton signed on to the flawed Kyoto treaty and the left went “all-in” on the claim that all of their opponents were anti-science.
(the now forgotten stem cell fight was another part of that claim; not so surprisingly it’s turned out that adult stem cells are just as useful as fetal stem cells)
And now the left has accepted the hard core “warming will be TEOTWAWKI” position as dogma, which is because the left has now become a completely dogmatic movement that brooks no internal opposition.
The only way that rational belief and healthy skepticism in the climate science movement will ever become the norm will be when the left is Defeated, Utterly. Dogma does not change by argument, Dogma can only be defeated.
And that means the fight is going to take place on the Political plane, and always will. When the political fight is won, then the scientific fight will be won shortly after. That order cannot be reversed.
Fortunately, recent events are very hopeful.

Kip, I certainly hope you’re right about the NYT. If they permanently tone down their rhetoric about Trump and his appointees being deniers, then that would be a hugely influential move. As the world’s premier newspaper, it would signal to the world (of journalism anyway) that a more “nuanced” approach to the subject is overdue.
Like most things, I’m skeptical about this. If NYT indeed changed in this way, does this mean that their editorial policy concerning climate change in general has changed? Or have they merely adopted a less pejorative approach to Donald Trump and his “policies”? My guess would be that they’re giving the President-elect the benefit of the doubt until he proves them wrong – itself a positive development.
One thought that keeps crossing my mind is that the “denier” label, pejorative though it is, unfortunately correctly applies to quite a large number of people. I assume that “denier” in the climate arena means someone who denies the basic science of climate change – i.e. the notion that increased airborne CO2 leads to increased temperatures. Let’s call this the GHE.
This blog and all skeptic blogs are replete with GHE deniers, which results in a huge amount of time and energy wasted commenting on questionable science. Many of these denizens have worked out impressive scientific arguments of why GHE either exists only in the lab or is non-existent even in the lab. I’m all for the First Amendment, but my eyes quickly glaze over when I see this discussion.
My only point is that “denier” applies correctly to a lot of people, and that if skeptics object to use of the term then they should examine their own views to see if it applies to them. Arguing that the term itself should be forbidden is another form of denial.
And words matter, of course. Bloggers and journalists should use words and terms correctly, particularly if they carry emotional baggage. Maybe this is what motivates the NYT.

scraft1 ==> The “trend” is still holding — no usage of the “climate change denier” label and no “Trumpo says climate change is a hoax” (in news stories) since mid-December. (There was one re-printed AP story that used the hoax quip.) Time will tell.

The nearest large city, for us, is Houston. It may surprise some, but it is a pretty liberal city with a liberal newspaper the Houston Chronicle. The most recent article on climate change is this one: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/The-conservative-push-to-convert-conservatives-on-9461552.php
They only interview alarmists who talk about how they are working to change conservative minds on climate change. The closest they come to a dissenting view is our (The Woodlands, Texas) US Representative Kevin Brady (Ways and Means Chairman), who would have none of it. Some of those interviewed work (or have worked) for Exxon and BP.
I would not expect the Chronicle to change its view for a long time, but the public here is generally skeptical of an imminent man-made climate disaster. Scientists and engineers are pretty easy to persuade with data and logic. The general public will listen to reason. The media are very hard to persuade, they love their cherry-picked sources. Politicians would rather jump off a cliff than change their minds, you have to vote them out to get change.
It has been a long time since the Chronicle published a story on the subject, maybe the election results affected their enthusiasm for a climate disaster. BTW, Houston went for Clinton 54-42%. Texas went for Trump 53-43%. Montgomery County (where I live) went Trump 74-23%.

Sheila Jackson Lee is Houston’s representative – nuff’ said. Texas is kind of odd – Inner city Houston, Inner City Dallas, and all of Austin are effectively hard-left political ghettos which exist like tumors inside the larger, conservative political body.

CBC (Toronto CBC 1) went full-alarm this morning with a story on an island off the coast of Prince Edward Island, saying that sea levels might rise by as much as 3 metres in the coming 85 years. “So how would that affect the people on the island if it rose 3 metres?” the interviewer asked.
They are doubling down, the CBC is, hoping to scoff their way into the hearts and minds of the long-suffering public. Carbon cap-and-trade starts tomorrow. The plan is to raise $1bn to subsidise renewables (net loss) beyond the damage caused by the marginal cost of public funds. The current estimate of economic damage (McKitrick 2016) from raising that amount of additional tax will be $6.3bn, plus the loss on the ‘renewables’. There is nothing more renewable in Ontario than the tax dollar. No matter how dumb and ill-considered the plan, those dollars keep on coming. It is another miracle of post-normal economic science.

It is the relevant editor that sets the tone/tenor of a media outlet. Until the editor changes his views on a subject or is replaced by someone with a different take on things the newspaper’s / network’s stance on a given subject matter will not change.
E.g. until Geoff Carr is replaced at the Economist and Clive Cookson at the Financial times these papers will not change their alarmist climate establishment CACC editorial line. Same thing goes for the BBC in the UK and the CBC in Canada. All four media outlets mentioned have explicit policies censoring skeptics including on their blog / comment pages [I cancelled my subscription to the FT after a very public comment spat with Cookson and his boss].
I’m glad to see the changes in Wisconsin but wouldn’t hold my breath on the NYT switching away from its champagne socialist the-science-is-settled-and all-those-who-don’t-agree-are-deniers editorial stance any time soon.

IMO, Trump’s election is effectively the end of the road for the catastrophic global warming crowd. I hold with those who believe we have just been in a natural warming cycle that will switch to a cooling phase eventually. That being the case, all we had to do was delay, as much as possible, anything to ‘fix’ the problem of CAGW and the economic damage that would ensue. The argument would end once nature had its say.
I feel reasonably certain that the US government’s push to issue climate change regulation will at least be stalled, if not rolled back, for at least four years. I have hopes that by that time, no one will be able to deny that the earth has begun a cooling phase, and warming is not the problem people thought it was. The editors can change their positions, be considered irrelevant, global cooling climate deniers, or more likely, quietly retire.

The thing that puzzles me is that this is the wrong way round.
I would much more expect to see the Climate Change policies being gradually diluted or withdrawn – while the language and the hype remains exactly the same. After all, it’s the hype that brings in the money and provides the cushy jobs…

Just read Steyn’s book Disgrace to the Profession. I knew the Stick was bad, but not that it was total garbage and has been essentially “disappeared” from the IPCC report.
This is a rotten house of cards. Kick it over. “Disappear it” like the Stick. No prisoners.

The Accuweather GW blog has changed since the November 2016 election. The blog used to support having reader comments at the end of its climate articles. The comments disappeared a few days after the election. After the election, some commenters were discussing the President Elect and proposed changes to funding for climate change programs in the Federal Government, under the Trump Administration. Then the comments section disappeared.

Thanks Kip Hansen –
[This little exerpt:]
“President-elect Donald J. Trump has packed his cabinet with nominees who dispute the science of global warming. He has signaled he will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He has belittled the notion of global warming and attacked policies intended to combat it.”
Why there’s no one in the land of the brave and the free to stand up for their rights.

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